Basketball records to sight at 2024 Paris Olympics
As Team USA’s males and females pursue their fifth and eighth consecutive gold medals at the 2024 Paris Olympics, respectively, a decide neighborhood of folk can also etch their names in Olympic lore. Most of those potential records are so enormous that they transcend basketball and put some athletes in rarefied air.
A fourth gold medal and further
Kevin Durant is motivated to take the outing to Paris despite coping with a calf stress. Two prestigious records are up for grabs for the Suns megastar.
First, Durant can became the first male athlete to procure four gold medals in a crew sport, following Team USA’s wins within the 2012, 2016 and 2020 Video games. France’s Nikola Karabatic will enact the the same feat if he can lead his nation to gold in males’s handball.
2nd, Durant is staunch 54 parts timorous of surpassing Lisa Leslie’s file for quite a lot of Olympic parts throughout males and females. The sharpshooting ahead already holds the file for quite a lot of parts (435) and PPG (19.7) in males’s Team USA history.
First to a sixth Olympiad
Team USA’s Diana Taurasi and Spain’s Rudy Fernandez are space to became the principle basketball players to compete at six Olympics. Both made their debuts at the 2004 Athens Olympics.
Taurasi already shares the file (with Sue Chook) for quite a lot of Olympic golds in a crew sport, with five gold medals thru the 2004 and 2020 Video games. With a sixth gold medal, Taurasi will lengthen her file as the athlete with basically the most Olympic gold medals in any crew sport.
The oldest American debutant
Stephen Curry will model his long-awaited Olympic debut in Paris. At 36, he’s going to became the oldest basketball player to debut for Team USA since Larry Chook, who used to be 35 years and 240+ days when he played for the Dream Team at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
On a connected squawk, LeBron James, 39, will became the oldest hooper to ever assert Team USA, surpassing the old file space by Chook in 1992. The 2024 Paris Olympics will stamp James’ return to the Olympic stage for the principle time in a decade. He didn’t play in 2016 and 2020.
A shot at immortality
This one is never always basically an particular person file but one that can if truth be told highlight American females’s dominance of Olympic basketball. Since their loss to the Soviets within the semifinals of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, the American females private gone 56-0 en route to seven consecutive gold medals.
An eighth consecutive gold medal in Paris would give them the file for basically the most consecutive Olympic gold medals in any crew sport, surpassing their male U.S. counterparts, who won seven golds between the 1936 Berlin Olympics and 1960 Rome Olympics.